The Indian World of George Washington Read online

  The Susquehannocks were a much more formidable opponent than the Doegs. Susquehannock retaliations helped arouse popular support for Nathaniel Bacon’s rebellion against Governor Berkeley. Frontier inhabitants complained that the governor did not prosecute the war with sufficient vigor. Instead, he established a line of forts that proved inadequate to the task of stemming Indian attacks, a problem George Washington would encounter eighty years later.20 Bacon urged a war of extermination against all Indians, “whether Friends or Foes.” According to Robert Beverley, people were “ready to vent all their Resentment against the poor Indians.”21 When Bacon and his followers started killing Indians, Berkeley outlawed him for waging war without the approval of the Virginia Assembly. Bacon promptly turned on the government, harnessing widespread resentment against a body that awarded generous land grants to eastern elites but extended inadequate protection to frontier settlers. By the time social order was restored, the English had driven Indian peoples from Tidewater Virginia, driven them underground, or driven them into slavery. Many surviving Indians left the region for the Susquehanna Valley, leaving only four tributary communities in the colony.22 The war removed Indians as a threat and as a dominant presence in the Tidewater. Virginia would not fight another Indian war for nearly eighty years.

  After three marriages, John Washington died in 1677 at forty-six, probably of typhoid fever. His eldest son, Lawrence, died in 1698 at thirty-eight. Lawrence’s second son, Augustine, known as a tough businessman, increased his landholdings from 1,100 acres to 2,850 by marrying Jane Butler. She bore him three children: Lawrence, Augustine Jr., and Jane. When his first wife died, Augustine married Mary Ball. Their first child, George, was born on February 11, 1732, adjusted according to the new Gregorian calendar to February 22.23 His birthplace at Wakefield on Pope’s Creek, like much of his father’s property and George’s boyhood home, lay on sites Indians had occupied and farmed for generations.24

  Confined to bounded and diminishing enclaves within their homeland, Virginian Indians endured continued land loss, population decline, poverty, and lack of legal protection for their lands and persons. Many found employment as guides, laborers, and servants and earned cash by selling baskets, pottery, mats, tanned deerskins, and other goods in English settlements. As Virginia planters began to build fortunes harvesting and marketing a Native plant on Native lands, many Indian people became slaves in their expanding tobacco fields, servants in their growing households, and wage laborers in the colonial economy. Virginians took captives in their wars against local Indians, kidnapped and indentured the children of tributary Indians, and imported and enslaved “foreign” Indians taken captive by other Indians. The Virginia Assembly attempted to regulate Indian slavery, waffled on whether to allow it or outlaw it, but effectively legalized it in 1682. They shipped some Indian slaves to the Caribbean and to other colonies. Other Indian slaves toiled alongside African slaves on Chesapeake tobacco plantations, although they were valued less highly than the African slaves.25

  Virginians began trading for Indian slaves in the 1650s. Around 1656 they first encountered the Westos, whom they called “Stranger Indians.” A group of Eries who had fled Iroquois attacks in the north and migrated to the James River, the Westos became Indian slavers. Together with Occaneechis from the Piedmont area, and armed with English guns, they raided farther south and deep into the interior, bringing captives to slave traders in Virginia and Carolina. Then, having dominated the southeastern slave trade for thirty years, the Westos became its victims when migrant Shawnees in the pay of Carolina destroyed them. After the 1670s traders from Carolina developed more extensive slave-trading networks. Indians traded deerskins for English guns and then turned their guns on less-well-armed neighbors to acquire captives to sell to the English as slaves. Virginian traders led packhorse trains over the mountains to Cherokee towns, and Cherokees armed with Virginian guns pushed Muskogean peoples out of eastern Tennessee and into what is now Alabama and Georgia. By the 1690s English traders had reached the Chickasaws in the Mississippi Valley, and Chickasaws were raiding across the great river for captives, whom they traded to Virginia and Carolina. Trade paths and slave raiding brought Indians from far beyond the Tidewater regions into contact and commerce with the Atlantic world, and the repercussions reverberated deep into the interior. Guns and slave raids generated unprecedented levels of violence, upheaval, and migration and created conditions and routes that allowed epidemic diseases to spread like wildfire. In 1696 smallpox arrived in Virginia, probably on board African slave ships. From there it traveled south along the coast and into the Carolina Piedmont. It devastated the remaining Indian peoples of the Tidewater region who lived closest to the English, and once it penetrated the slave-raiding-and-gun-trading networks it swept the Southeast on a four-year rampage. Emerging from the chaos, peoples from different groups, languages, and cultures, who lived more distantly from the English and suffered less severe mortality rates, coalesced to form new polities.26 The combined effects of gun violence, slave wars, and smallpox sent populations plummeting. By one estimate, the Indian population of the Southeast fell by two-thirds in the roughly half a century before Washington was born, from approximately two hundred thousand in 1685 to fewer than sixty-seven thousand in 1730.27

  As Virginia Indians struggled to adjust to the new world that English invasion and colonialism had created, the English increasingly consigned them to a separate world reserved for inferior races.28 In 1691 the Virginia Assembly passed a law forbidding white people to marry “Negroes, Mulattoes and Indians” on pain of expulsion from the colony. Apparently it had the desired effect: unlike the French, said Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant governor from 1710 to 1722, Virginians had no interest in “beginning a nearer friendship by intermarriage, … for notwithstanding the long intercourse between ye Inhabitants of this Country and ye Indians, and their living amongst one another for so many Years, I cannot find one Englishman that has an Indian Wife, or an Indian married to a white woman.”29 Pocahontas and John Rolfe were the exception, not the rule. The College of William and Mary, chartered in 1693, was partly dedicated to educating Indian students but had few or no pupils until the eighteenth century. (Then enrollment may have varied from as few as one or two to as many as two dozen. In 1723 the college established a separate building, the Brafferton School, where Indian students were taught the rudiments of reading and writing and in theory trained as missionaries.30) In 1705 Virginia declared Indian slaves, along with black and mulatto slaves, to be “real estate” and forbade them, as it did blacks, to hold office, testify in court, sue white people, or strike a white person, even in self-defense. Eighteenth-century Virginians recognized different categories of Indians: black Indians, colored persons of Indian descent, white Indians, and mulatto Indians. Colonial constructions of race that identified “mixed” Indians as blacks segregated Indian people from settler society and increased the servile labor force while at the same time reducing the number of people with a rival claim to the land.31 In 1711 the Executive Council required tributary and other friendly Indians to wear badges of copper and pewter, respectively, and not “to hunt or come among the Inhabitants of this colony” without them.32

  By 1700 war, disease, land loss, and the destructive conditions created by colonialism had reduced Tidewater Virginia’s Indian population to perhaps 10 percent of what it had been in 1600. Thirty years later, fewer than 1,000 Indians may have survived in Virginia east of the mountains, amid a sea of white (103,000) and black (almost 50,000) faces.33 According to Robert Beverley, the Indians were “almost wasted”; the Virginia militia kept “the Indians round about in Subjection, and have no sort of Apprehension from them.”34 Andrew Burnaby, a young Englishman who visited Washington at Mount Vernon during his travels in 1759, passed by a Pamunkey town where the remnants of the tribe lived, “the rest having dwindled away through intemperance and disease.” Inhabiting about 2,000 acres on the Pamunkey River, they were chiefly employed hunting or fishing for the lo
cal gentry. “They commonly dress like the Virginians, and I have sometimes mistaken them for the lower sort of that people,” wrote Burnaby.35 Washington grew up in a world where his few Indian neighbors eked out an existence by fishing and hunting or worked as farmhands, servants, and slaves. Virginians treated them as dependent people, not independent nations.

  Things were different beyond the mountains.

  having reduced the neighboring tribes to tributary status and pushed to the Fall Line (the edge of the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain), Virginians began extending their settlements westward and funneling through gaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Young planters moving west into the rich lands of the Shenandoah Valley met growing numbers of immigrants moving southwest from Pennsylvania, following natural corridors and pushing deep into Indian country.36 The majority of migrants to Virginia in the seventeenth century had come from the South and West of England. They brought their regional folkways with them, and the great planter families set the model for a society ordered around property, wealth, and rank. Many of the emigrants pushing down the Shenandoah were German-speaking people, who had a reputation for being orderly and industrious. But many more were from northern Britain, and most were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. They brought with them a long history of borderland violence and built communities that struck contemporaries as mobile, disorderly, and militant. Descendants of Scots transplanted to Ulster in the early seventeenth century to create a buffer against the Catholic Irish, they again served British imperial policy by creating a buffer against the French and the Indians. In fact, they often spearheaded the invasion of Indian country, squatting wherever they found vacant land and flouting any attempts to regulate or restrain them. James Logan, provincial secretary of Pennsylvania, declared them “troublesome settlers to the government and hard neighbors to the Indians.”37 Settlers from Maryland and Pennsylvania migrated southward into Virginia in such numbers that William Byrd II said they “swarm[ed] lik the Goths and vandals of old.”38 But Byrd was happy to settle the newcomers—especially industrious Swiss immigrants—on the frontiers to guard against Indian attacks. The Virginia gentry learned that it paid to share the western lands with newcomers, so long as they kept the best for themselves.39 It was a lesson Washington would learn well and a policy he would perpetuate.

  Virginia’s westward orientation took it across old paths that connected the Iroquois in the north to the Indian peoples of the Chesapeake and, farther south, to the Cherokees and Catawbas. Virginians who pushed over the Blue Ridge Mountains came into the orbit of the Haudenosaunee, the Five Nations of the Iroquois in what is now upstate New York. The Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas had united in a league of peace long before Europeans arrived. Virginia first established relations with them in 1677, when it joined the Covenant Chain, a series of alliances that developed in the seventeenth century between the Five Nations and their Native allies and the English colonies. Virginia began sending diplomatic missions to negotiate with the Iroquois, usually working in conjunction with the governor and council of New York in Albany. (At one such meeting, the Iroquois gave Governor Howard Effingham the name Assarigoa; they may have been referring to the sword he wore as part of his formal attire, but to Mohawk ears the name Howard, translated via Dutch interpreters, sounded like assarakowa, meaning “long knife.” The Iroquois addressed all subsequent governors of Virginia by this title. With more sinister connotations Indians called first Virginians and then all American frontiersmen “long knives.”) By joining the Covenant Chain, Virginia entered a new area of Indian country and a new era of Indian relations.40

  The Iroquois were rebuilding. Recognizing that entanglement in imperial conflicts between England and France had sent their population into a downward spiral, Iroquois diplomats pulled out of the decline by pulling out of the conflicts. They negotiated treaties with the French and their Indian allies at Montreal and with the English at Albany in 1701, charted a new foreign policy of neutrality, and practiced a diplomatic balancing act that allowed them to steer clear of imperial wars and regain their strength. They took smaller nations, including refugees from Virginia and Maryland, under their protection as “props” to their league and, on the basis of past wars, claimed dominion over large areas they did not occupy.

  Iroquois warriors resumed, or continued, raiding Catawbas, Cherokees, and Saponis, as well as Virginia’s tributary tribes. They waged “mourning wars” in which killing or capturing enemies helped to appease the spirits of deceased relatives (and offset population losses at home). Catawbas and Cherokees reciprocated.41 War parties followed the Warriors’ Path, also known as the Great Indian Warpath, through the Shenandoah Valley, and sometimes threatened Virginian settlements. In 1716 Governor Spotswood led an expedition of sixty-three gentlemen and adventurers across the Blue Ridge Mountains and into the Shenandoah Valley, where he acquired more than 85,000 acres of land in the next six years. But Spotswood’s western land ambitions collided with the Iroquois, who claimed the Piedmont as hunting territory and a right-of-way for their war parties. The governor needed Iroquois cooperation, or at least acquiescence, in his schemes for western settlement. In 1722 he traveled almost six hundred miles to attend a treaty negotiation with the Five Nations in Albany, where he secured their agreement to give up the Piedmont as hunting ground and stay west of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Piedmont—including the future sites of Thomas Jefferson’s birthplace and Monticello—was open to English colonization. Nevertheless, conflicting claims and disputed boundaries among Indian nations, colonial governments, and private interests continued to check Virginian expansion.42

  The governor and Royal Council of Virginia had to approve land grants, but most grants went to the families who dominated the council. In essence, gentry sitting in the Assembly or House of Burgesses made huge grants of lands for small sums of money to gentry who promised to settle farmers. Between 1728 and 1732, Lieutenant Governor William Gooch and his council issued ten land orders for more than 360,000 acres in the Shenandoah Valley, 125,000 acres in 1732 alone. The terms encouraged rapid settlement: those individuals or groups to whom the land was granted had two years in which to settle one family for every 1,000 acres; each family had to “improve” 3 of every 50 acres granted within three years. A few colonists made their way into the Shenandoah Valley in the late 1720s, but the first substantial migration occurred in 1732. Meanwhile, Lord Thomas Fairfax’s agent, Robert “King” Carter, was granting large areas in the northern Shenandoah Valley to prominent Tidewater families. Fairfax, who had left his ancestral estate at Leeds Castle in Kent and settled at Belvoir on the Potomac, had inherited a royal grant, made by Charles II to Royalists in 1649, of more than 5 million acres between the Potomac and Rappahannock Rivers and reaching across the Alleghenies. He would later move west himself into the Shenandoah Valley. Virginia’s liberal land policies created a lucrative market for ambitious men with capital to invest.43

  By the time Washington was born, then, Virginian traders had penetrated Indian country, tobacco planters from the Tidewater were moving west, and livestock farmers from Pennsylvania were moving south into the Shenandoah Valley and parts of the Piedmont. They caused far-reaching changes in the lands they occupied. Indian women typically planted their fields with corn, beans, and squash and left them fallow in a cycle that allowed the soil to regenerate and replenish. Virginia tobacco planters practiced single-crop agriculture that drained the soil of nutrients until the land was exhausted, sometimes after three or four years. They then cleared new plots of land and let the depleted ground lie fallow. But it took about twenty years for fallow fields to recover and again become suitable for tobacco, and a planter needed roughly twenty acres for each laborer he used to grow tobacco. With additional acreage to graze livestock, grow corn, and harvest wood for burning and building, the system of shifting agriculture that planters used to avert chronic soil exhaustion required huge amounts of land.44 As happened elsewhere, when planters and their laborers spread inland, they a
ltered landscapes and ecosystems. They cut into forests; spread invasive grasses, weeds, parasites, and pests; and brought in cattle, pigs, and other domesticated livestock that grazed and trampled indigenous fauna and Indian fields and drove away deer.45

  Many gentlemen planters, like Washington’s father, added new lands to their estates and invested in western lands whose values would increase as soil fertility in the older, more settled areas of the colony decreased under the exhaustive impact of tobacco cultivation. As population grew and young men moved west to establish their own households and start small plantations, planters supplemented their income from tobacco cultivation by selling or renting lands to tenants who would occupy and improve them. Tobacco cultivation entered a period of growth that, though interrupted by bouts of international war, held for more than thirty years, producing a “golden age” for Chesapeake planters. Tobacco imports to Britain rose from 41 million pounds in 1730 to 85 million pounds in 1753, declined during the Seven Years’ War, then resumed their climb to 98 million pounds in 1763.46

  Western lands offered Virginia’s planters new opportunities but also rendered them increasingly dependent on tobacco cultivation and the labor system on which in turn it depended. African slaves made up 30 percent of Virginia’s population, and race and rank divided Virginian society. Every individual occupied a recognized place in the social order. An individual like Washington, born into a family that stood outside the first rank of gentry planters like the Carter, Fairfax, and Lee families, was anxious to cement his place and advance his wealth and status.47 Indian lands across the mountains offered the opportunity to increase wealth; fashionable clothing, furniture, and other manufactured goods from across the Atlantic offered the means to display the status wealth brought.